TL; DR
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What comes to your mind when you hear the words: “BitSNARK & Grail”?
a) A new Netflix special from a famous comedy duo
b) A team of spies using code names to maintain anonymity
c) A solution to solve a major part of the Holy Grail of blockchain technology – the trilemma – increasing transaction speed on the Bitcoin network tenfold.
If you answered a or b, we wouldn’t blame you. But luckily Seb and Chevy are not planning to become comedians (or anonymous spies).
This week a new whitepaper was published called BitSNARK & Grail including a detailed proposal on how to solve the Bitcoin trilemma.
The trilemma states that for a blockchain to function, tradeoffs must be made between at least one of the following: decentralization, security, or scalability.
Bitcoin has always been highly decentralized due to the way new BTC is mined, and the fact that it didn’t start with one group of people owning a large portion of the crypto.
Bitcoin is insanely safe. To date, it has never been hacked. *knock on wood*
The trade-off was scalability.
Compare it with Solana, for example: BTC can process approximately 7 transactions per second. Solana can process approximately 65,000 transactions per second.
So the big minds behind BitSNARK & Grail have come up with a solution: use rollups on the BTC network.
Rollups bundle a number of transactions outside the chain, validate them and then bring them back into the chain (so that the original blockchain only needs to process a single transaction).
We like to see innovation happening in all corners of web3.
But innovation focused on the Bitcoin blockchain makes us extra enthusiastic.
I like to see it 🙂